About | Google Ads

Understanding Google Ads

What is Google Ads?
Google Ads is Google's online advertising program. Through Google Ads, you can create online ads to reach people exactly when they're interested in the products and services that you offer.

• Google Ads is a product that you can use to promote your business, help sell products or services, raise awareness, and increase traffic to your website.
• Google Ads accounts are managed online, so you can create and change your ad campaign at any time, including your ad text, settings, and budget.
• There's no minimum spending commitment, and you set and control your own budget. You choose where your ad appears, set a budget that's comfortable for you, and easily measure the impact of your ad.

Google Ads Campaign Types
Advertising with Google Ads all begins with creating a campaign. The type of campaign you choose to create should be based on your advertising goals. For example, if you'd like to show ads on Google to attract more visitors to your website, you would choose a Search Network campaign. Each advertising network has different types of campaigns to suit your goals.

As you get started with your campaign setup, you'll be asked to select campaign goals and pick a campaign type.

You can select a goal for your campaign based on the actions you’d like your customers to take. You can also select a campaign type, such as Search Network, Display Network, Shopping, or Video. You’ll then see recommendations for features and settings that can help you meet your campaign's main advertising objective. Keep in mind that all campaign settings and features will be available to you despite what goal you choose, and you can always make a change to your goal, or choose not to use a goal.

Goals include:

• Sales
• Leads
• Website traffic
• Product & brand consideration
• Brand Awareness & reach

The campaign type determines where customers will be able to see your ads, but you make this more specific by targeting your ads.

Common campaign types include:

• Search Network Campaign
• Display Network Campaign
• Shopping Campaign
• Video Campaign
• Performance Max Campaign

Search Network Campaign
The Google Search Network is a group of search-related websites and apps where your ads can appear. When you advertise on the Google Search Network, your ad can show near search results when someone searches with terms related to one of your keywords.

Ads can appear above or below search results on Google Search. They can appear beside, above, or below search results on Google Play, Google Shopping, Google Images, and Google Maps, including the Maps app.

Display Network Campaign
The Google Display Network can help you reach people while they’re browsing their favourite websites, showing a friend a YouTube video, checking their Gmail account, or using mobile devices and apps.

The Google Display Network is designed to help you find the right audience. Its targeting options let you strategically show your message to potential customers at the right place and the right time.

Shopping Campaign
If you're a retailer, you can use Shopping campaigns to promote your online and local inventory, boost traffic to your website or local store, and find better qualified leads.

To get started, you'll send us your product data with Merchant Center and create a campaign in Google Ads. Then we'll use your campaign to create ads on Google and around the web where potential customers can see what you're selling. We call these placements Shopping ads because they appear in a different, more visual format.

In contrast to a text ad, which displays text only, Shopping ads show users a photo of your product, plus a title, price, store name, and more. These ads give users a strong sense of the product you're selling before they click the ad, which gives you more qualified leads.

Video Campaign
Video campaigns let you show video ads on their own or within other streaming video content on YouTube and across the Google Display Network. This article explains the different components of Video campaigns and how you can use them.
Available video ad formats include skippable in-stream ads, non-skippable in-stream ads, video discovery ads, outstream ads, and bumper ads.

Skippable in-stream ads play before, during, or after other videos. After this type of ad plays for 5 seconds, the viewer is given the option to skip it.

Non-skippable in-stream ads are designed to allow you to reach customers with your entire message and are 15 seconds or less.
Video discovery ads only appear on YouTube and reach people in places where they’re discovering content. The appearance will vary, depending on the ad sizes and ad formats that content publishers support. When a viewer clicks the thumbnail for your ad, the video will play on its YouTube watch or channel page.

Bumper ads are a short video ad format, designed to allow you reach customers broadly and increase awareness of your brand by using a short, memorable message. Bumper ads are just 6 seconds or less, and viewers can’t skip the ad.

Performance Max Campaigns
Performance Max campaigns are a powerful advertising solution offered by Google that allows you to maximize your campaign performance across multiple channels and platforms. With Performance Max campaigns, you can effectively reach your target audience, drive conversions, and achieve your marketing goals.

This campaign type leverages machine learning and automation to optimize your ad placements and budget allocation, ensuring that your ads are shown to the right people at the right time, on various Google networks and partner websites.

Performance Max campaigns offer a seamless integration of different ad formats, enabling you to showcase your products or services through a variety of creative options.

Machine Learning & The Power of Smart Bidding
As consumer expectations grow for more personalized, relevant, and assistive experiences, machine learning is becoming an invaluable tool to help meet those demands. It’s helping marketers create smarter customer segmentations, deliver more relevant creative campaigns, and measure performance more effectively.

At its core, machine learning is a way to quickly label and analyze huge data sets. People can do this on their own, but a machine helps do it faster and on an infinitely larger scale. In fact, 66% of marketing leaders agree automation and machine learning will enable their team to focus more on strategic marketing activities.

But machines can’t learn on their own, they need the help of a human. Here’s a golden rule to remember, a machine learning algorithm is only as good as the data it’s fed. So, to use machine learning effectively, you must have the right data for the problem you’re trying to solve. And not just a few data points.

Machines need a lot of data to learn, in fact hundreds of thousands of data points. Your data will need to be formatted, cleaned, and organized for your algorithm, and you will need two datasets, one to train the model and one to evaluate its performance.

What is Smart Bidding?
Smart Bidding is a set of conversion based bid strategies. Target Cost Per Action (CPA), Target Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) and Enhanced Cost Per Click (CPC), that use advanced machine learning to help you tailor the right bid to each and every auction.

It factors in a wide range of auction time signals including device, location, time of day, remarketing list, language, and operating system to capture the unique context of every search.

It takes into account the history of the advertiser, the user and your conversions.

The more conversions in your account then the faster the algorithm can learn. Of course conversions are a valuable action that a user has performed on your website such as an online purchase or submitting an enquiry form.

Responsive Search Ads
Responsive search ads use machine learning to deliver relevant messages to your customers. The more headlines and descriptions you enter, the more opportunities Google Ads has to serve ads that more closely match your potential customers’ search queries, which can improve your ad performance.

After you enter headlines and descriptions, Google Ads assembles the text into multiple ad combinations in a way that avoids redundancy. You can provide up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions for a single responsive search ad. Next, in any given ad, a maximum of 3 headlines and 2 descriptions will be selected to show in different combinations and orders.

Over time, Google Ads will test the most promising ad combinations, and learn which combinations are the most relevant for different queries.

Responsive search ads can help you:

• Create flexible ads that adapt to device widths, giving you more room to share your message with potential customers.
• Save time by providing multiple headlines and description options, then let Google Ads show the most relevant combinations to your customers.
• You can tailor your headlines and descriptions to your customers location or area of interest.
• Reach more potential customers with multiple headlines and descriptions options that give your ads the opportunity to compete in more auctions and match more queries.
• Increase ad group performance by attracting more clicks and conversions that your existing text ads aren’t capturing because responsive search ads help you compete in more auctions.

Responsive Display Ads
Responsive display ads are replacing responsive ads as the default ad type for the Display Network. They can be used in standard Display campaigns as well as Smart Display campaigns. To create a responsive display ad, upload your assets (images, headlines, logos, videos, and descriptions), and Google will automatically generate ads to be shown on the Google Display Network.

Benefits:

• Optimize your ads: When you create a responsive display ad by uploading different assets into Google Ads, Google uses a machine learning model to determine the optimal combination of assets for each ad slot based on predictions built from your performance history.
• Broader reach: Multiple assets can be uploaded per asset type (for example, multiple headlines, logos, videos, and images). The ads that Google assembles automatically adjust their size, appearance, and format to fit just about any available ad space. For example, a responsive display ad might show as a native banner ad on one site and a dynamic text ad on another.
• Add videos to your responsive display ads to help maximize your reach on the Display Network. Your videos will be shown instead of images whenever Google Ads determine videos could drive better performance for you.
• Save time: Using responsive display ads, you can reduce your overhead for managing ad portfolios within ad groups and campaigns, and dedicate more time to performance improvement.
• Can be used with dynamic remarketing: You can make your responsive display ads support dynamic remarketing by attaching a feed to your campaigns. Responsive ads show personalized content to customers from a feed you control and add to your campaign. If you add a feed to your campaign, your ads will show in both dynamic and static formats.

Smart Display campaigns
Smart Display campaigns offer a simple, intelligent solution to managing the complex variables of display advertising, and may be the most effortless way to broaden your customer base and win new conversions. Use a Smart Display campaign to show ads in almost all formats across the Google Display Network, reaching people at all stages in the buying cycle, from people with demonstrated interests to customers just about to buy.

Across the Display Network, Smart Display campaigns combine 3 optimization technologies to take the labor and guesswork out of targeting, bidding, and ad creation:

• Automated bidding. Using Target CPA as a basis, Smart Display campaigns optimize to set your bids according to the likelihood of conversion in each and every ad auction, seeking to give you the best possible value.
• Automated targeting. Targeting optimizes as your campaign runs, which means your ads increasingly show where they’ll get you the most business.Where applicable, Smart Display campaigns use dynamic prospecting to match your feed to the likeliest converters.
• Automated ad creation. Ads are automatically generated from the building blocks you provide, like headlines, descriptions, logos, and images. They responsively fit into almost all ad spaces across the Display Network.

Benefits:

• A top-performing campaign in minutes. You enter the building blocks for your ads, like headlines, images, logos and we’ll find you as many customers as we can within the CPA bid and budget you control.
• Smarter, not harder. Smart Display campaigns automatically optimize within days. Your campaign automatically selects the best combination of assets to give you the best performance. In this way, you can learn which of your headlines, descriptions, images, and logos perform best.
• Find the people who matter most. Reach the people who are most likely to convert and get as many conversions as possible at a bid you set. Smart Display campaigns optimize your performance with automated bidding and targeting, including remarketing.

Custom Intent Audiences
Custom intent audiences allow you to reach the ideal audience for your business in your Display and Video campaigns by segmenting ad groups according to the specific keywords and landing pages you would like to target.

You can use custom intent audiences with auto-created audience segments or you can define your own audiences by entering keywords, URLs and apps related to your product or service. Google Ads will then show ads to people who are likely to be interested in these keywords on pages, apps, and videos.

Previously, paid search ads have always had a big advantage over display ads, and that is intent by the user. People only see paid search ads when they are actively searching online for a product, service, or a solution to an issue. Hopefully, you would have set up your keywords correctly so that your ad is seen, clicked on, and results in conversions.

Conversely, this traditionally has not been the case with display ads. Usually, when someone sees your Display or YouTube ad they have not performed a search for a product, service or solution. Rather, you hope that they notice your ad, realise that they have a need, click and convert.

Custom intent audiences change all that, by putting ads in front of people on the display network and YouTube who have searched for a similar product, service or solution to what you offer.

If you wish to define your own audience list, you must create a keyword list to target the right customers.You can apply keywords, URL’s, apps or YouTube content to Display and Video campaigns to reach an online audience that’s actively researching a related product or service.

To help Google Ads understand your ideal audience, it’s best practice to add keywords and URLs, ideally 15 in total, that fit a common theme. Avoid entering URLs that require people to sign in, such as social media. Include keywords related to the products and services the target audience is researching, which will be used as the focal point for building the custom intent audience.

If you are seeking additional ways to increase your brand awareness using display or YouTube advertising it’s well worth taking advantage of this new service from Google.

If you are having an issue, we can help. Please get in touch.